Looking for Maintainer

I have not had the capacity to maintain this project in any meaningful way, but the source code is quite clear and reasonably well documented. If you would be interested to maintain this project, please apply on GitHub via an issue.

This project has currently fallen so behind Stack Exchange, that it currently doesn't do anything useful. Former description follows:

There's been an onslaught of rather difficult to read questions on SO lately. A lot of them are just plain close-fodder, but many are just from d ppl ,who spk teh internetz lingo and hence make my eyes bleed are pretty much incomprehensible without extensive parsing/editing. They also somehow do not manage to grasp basic markdown. Now manually editing all these answers can often be a massive pain, so I wrote this extension.

It adds a few more buttons to the SE edit pages (so no distractions when just posting) that aid in making these sites awesome.

Autocorrect

This is the main tool of the suite. It is in fact a huge collection of regexps that correct the most common mistakes people commonly make on SO. These include (see the source for full details):

correcting capitalization (how do i do jquery. help. => How do I do jQuery. Help.)

Note: These are Regexps, not any smart NLP so check the post so that you don't screw anything up. For that it provides:

Realtime diff

There's a handy link provided that toggles between the realtime preview and a realtime diff of your changes and the original version. All of the automated functions also automatically display the diff after execution.

Lowercasing

Sometimes people JUST CAN'T HELP SHOUTING! There's a handy button that converts selected text to lowercase, or finds sequences of shouting and lowercases them automatically.

Search & Replace

Sometimes a simple regexp can fix a lot of problems instantaneously. Click on the search button and get the Search & Replace interface:

JS regexp support. Did I mention insta-diffing?

Code-sanetm

Sometimes people Copy-paste their code and it gets all messy. This replaces tabs with four spaces and realigns all code to the four space offset, making reformatting it a breeze. Also autoindents C-like languages to further ease the pain.

Where can I get it?

Note: I no longer have the resources to maintain the suite. I'm sure that making this a working user script would not take too much effort so pull requests with fixes are most welcome.

Gotchas

Autocorrect and Lowercase ignore code so be sure to mark stuff as code before you apply them.

Autocorrect also applies to the title of the post, be sure to check that as well.

Filenames sometimes get autocorrected. Mark them as code or correct them back (some common extensions are checked for, but this is by no means comprehensive. If the post is full of filenames, consider not using Autocorrect).

Version History

1.1.0 released 16/3: Fixes a few bugs, adds support for C-like languages to Code-sane, adds quite a few product capitalizations and some determiner handling (an hash a apricot => a hash an apricot).

I have converted this into a UserScript, which you can find in my answer below.
–
Nathan Osman♦Mar 16 '11 at 1:24

@George Care to add it to the github repository? As the conversion looks more or less like a fairly straightforward (= automatable) process I could update both simultaneously.
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Jakub HamplMar 16 '11 at 1:25

1

@Jakub: Actually... it's not as easy as it looks. (I had to make quite a few subtle modifications.) But I'm thinking of setting something up on my server that automatically pulls the changes from GitHub and rebuilds the UserScript every so often.
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Nathan Osman♦Mar 16 '11 at 1:28

1

@Jakub: ...and done! Every 24 hours, this file will be generated from the GitHub repos.
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Nathan Osman♦Mar 16 '11 at 19:15

8 Answers
8

Deprecated.

I'm afraid I've sort of abandoned my UserScript conversion of this extension. It was quite buggy and extremely difficult to debug. It would take less effort to write a UserScript version from scratch. – George Edison♦ Dec 20 '11 at 0:51

+1e100 I see you went after the other half of the cash! See my "answer" for a bug report. I don't know if it's specific to your version or also applies to the original.
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Dennis WilliamsonMar 16 '11 at 1:34

1

@Dennis: Please take a look at the note I added to this post.
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Nathan Osman♦Mar 16 '11 at 19:16

In his updated original post, Jakub asks "BTW does the auto-update system work?" Is this functional in your build for the end user (e.g. me)?
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Dennis WilliamsonMar 20 '11 at 20:07

@Dennis: It should be. I just checked and it seems like the build script is functioning as expected.
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Nathan Osman♦Mar 20 '11 at 20:33

@Dennis: Sorry, yes - you do need to update. What is meant by 'auto-update' is that the script you update from is itself updated daily directly from the source code on GitHub.
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Nathan Osman♦Mar 20 '11 at 21:00

OK, since Jakub didn't qualify his question I though he meant that code had been added to auto-update the end-users installed copy. Sorry for the confusion.
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Dennis WilliamsonMar 20 '11 at 21:12

@Dennis: No problem. I understand the confusion - although an auto-update for the installed copy would be nice!
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Nathan Osman♦Mar 20 '11 at 21:18

The userscript doesn't seem to work - have tried in Firefox 3.6 and 4.0...
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studiohackMar 26 '11 at 6:52

@studiohack: What errors do you get when running the script?
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Nathan Osman♦Mar 26 '11 at 19:34

@GeorgeEdison: I don't get anything, nothing shows up at all...I've seen screenshots of what it is supposed to look like, but nothing seems to appear...I've had several other users (on SU) also say the same thing...
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studiohackMar 26 '11 at 19:41

@studiohack: It currently only works on Meta.SO.
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Nathan Osman♦Mar 26 '11 at 20:26

1

@Jakub: I haven't had time to set that up yet. But it's planned.
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Nathan Osman♦Mar 27 '11 at 16:43

2

As per @Sathya's bug report below, is there any chance of fixing this for inline editing? Can't get it to work on Chrome Dev.
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slhckAug 25 '11 at 10:55

Using George Edison's UserScript version. FF4.0 windows Vista - nothing shows up in the toolbar. The same installation on chrome (10.0l.648.204) is intermittent - sometimes the buttons show up and sometimes they don't.

@GeorgeEdison - I can try to help but don't know where to start :-s
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SathyaApr 30 '11 at 7:06

@GeorgeEdison Has any progress been made? Buttons still don't show up on Chrome version 16.0
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wizlogDec 19 '11 at 22:18

1

@wizlog: I'm afraid I've sort of abandoned my UserScript conversion of this extension. It was quite buggy and extremely difficult to debug. It would take less effort to write a UserScript version from scratch.
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Nathan Osman♦Dec 20 '11 at 0:51

I just installed the latest version and I can't reproduce. What browser / OS / etc. are you using?
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Nathan Osman♦Mar 20 '11 at 5:32

@George: Chrome (Beta) on Vista. I just tried it on Photography and Game Development. In both cases, a toolbar appeared if I tried to edit a question, but not if I tried to edit an answer.
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Dennis WilliamsonMar 20 '11 at 10:33

Aha! I can reproduce the problem editing answers on Photo.SE. Looking into it...
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Nathan Osman♦Mar 20 '11 at 19:35

Seems to be a problem with the script and not my packaging, so I'll let @Jakub look into it.
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Nathan Osman♦Mar 20 '11 at 19:40

Should be fixed in the source now, coming to a release near you soon.
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Jakub HamplMar 22 '11 at 16:35

@Jakub: I don't know why that sounds weird, but some combination of change/toggle and case/capitalization or some variation perhaps. Maybe somebody will come along with a better idea.
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Dennis WilliamsonMar 19 '11 at 22:13

@Dennis I'm hoping to get some proper icons for a near future release so I'll add it to that.
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Jakub HamplMar 19 '11 at 22:44